When I moved to Vermont nearly 30 years ago, I heard what I thought were fables about poor people were genuinely pissed that their kids had to go to school. Those people didn't want their children learning anything because then their kids would be better than the parents. Turned out those weren't fables. I have heard from teachers and administrators about first-hand encounters with enraged parents who were fearful that their kids would end up with better-paying jobs and end up "putting on airs" because the kids learned to read and write.
In this, Vermont is kind of a bellwether of much of the rest of rural America. There has been a slow but steady sea change in the hinterlands, one that has taken us from each generation working hard to ensure then next generation has a better life and DOESN'T have to work as hard, to one that's much more of a crab-bucket mentality. No one escapes rural poverty because they will not let their kids have a better life.
A few months ago, I was in the wilds of South Carolina. One of the men I was working with started complaining about how "the kids today have it so easy." I said "Isn't that kind of the point? Making it easier for your kids to succeed?"
"No!" he said. He was adamant that his kids had to struggle at least as much as he did because struggle builds character. The fact that the deck is already stacked against his kids doesn't matter. And eventually it came out that what he really wanted was for his kids to be blue-collar working stiffs or (for his daughter) maybe a secretary or clerk before becoming a brood mare. In other words, he wanted his kids to be no better off than he was.
Listen, being paid a pittance to do dangerous work without adequate protections or health care that will still work after you can't because of your injuries is *part* of what makes you one of our Retail Heroes.
I'll be honest: my father, mostly not a bigoted man, believed that this was a Gentile character flaw. I have since, of course, now met and heard of many non-Jews who don't have it, and met my fair share of Jews who want their children to be as blinkered as they though better-off (I actually know a Jew who's proud of his son's going to work for the Federalist Society), but it was my dad's opinion that this and literacy that we really had going for us in the Modern World where it was now _possible_ for a son to be better-off than his father.
That is to say, in any human, this tendency seems likely an adaptation of millenia living in societies even more unfair than ours and under rulers who on their best days mostly were exactly like Donald Trump.
A countervailing stream in Jewish thought is that the unworthiness that led to our Temple's being destroyed and Exile from our homeland meant that we should not expect any kind of happiness until Meschiach came; the countervailing stream to _that_ is the doctrine that G-d created lawful pleasures and that rejecting them were rejecting him. I'm really glad we didn't have a Pope to settle things in one direction or another.
A rabbi once told me that the destruction of the Temple came about because the people took to gossiping, and as gossip destroys a community, so did it destroy the Temple. I know some ultra-orthodox Jews who believe this. I have even seen cars being driven by men wearing streimls with payos and full beards--with the bumper adorned with a single bumper sticker:
A grandfather was a disciple of the Chofetz Chayim (a rabbi named after his well-known book on (formally) 'ha-Lashon ha-Ra' ('malevolent language'); his wife was less enthusiastic, but had few friends with whom she _could_ gossip.
Another telling: 'The first Temple was destroyed when wedding songs were sung to celebrate homosexuality; the second was destroyed because of causeless internecine quarreling.' . I don't endorse the first section of that, but I'm not particularly ashamed because Earth has been barbarian territory for awhile and likely won't make it out that state before we kill ourselves, so I probably believe things equally barbarous and our notional descendants will all have their own stupid beliefs.
I think that you may be overestimating the knowledge (and maybe the intelligence) of the American people. I think that most (white, at least) Americans really do believe that these countries in places like Europe, for instance are indeed hell holes and we have it much better here. At least that is what I see from FB friends living here in the buttlands with me, and ones I know personally outside of social media. And let's not forget the GDNYT, just recently started a story telling us that the US medical system is the best in the world.
Freedom religion is a religion, isn't it? People not sure what the word means, it's kind of metaphysical, but we have it and those snotty foreigners don't. Sure things look nice in the Netherlands but they're probably empty inside where we are filled with our love of our freedom, whatever it is. We know this through our faith.
Yeah, the Netherlands is a complete hellhole. What, with legal hashish and legal prostitution and excellent beer and top-notch healthcare and world-leading public infrastructure and outstanding shipbuilding abilities and first-rate schools. Well, it's a wonder anyone can live there!
An early Nat Lampoon piece was a parody of a crank newsletter--lousy layout, typos, etc.--called something like The National Coalition to Beat the Dutch, about the perfidy and treachery of Holland, vile tulips, etc. "A Dutch treat? It's no treat at all!" So you're onto something here.
Remember, hashish isn't legal, it's just not-illegal the moment it crosses the coffee-shop threshold…and evidently (as of a few years back) the Rightist government there has been cracking-down, such that mostly only the gangs were growing.
Hail Freedom, God of Freedom! I remember being as old as 17 and wondering how people could stand to live in other, lesser countries (all the others were lesser). On some level I imagined every European and Asian as longing to be American. It is not my fault, really: that was the general sense about us in the 1980s, I'd never been anyplace except the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and since grammar school (in suburban NJ, just outside NYC) our "social studies" textbooks taught that other countries were weird and backward (in Mexico they wore blankets and led burros around a desert, in Holland they wore wooden shoes and the children were put to work selling cheese on streetcorners, in Russia they stood in line all day for potatoes). I was 28 before I finally went anywhere; then I remember standing in a parking lot in Bath, England, and I made such weird eye contact with a stranger that it prompted him to say hello, and it suddenly hit me: Holy fuck, I could live my exact same happy life HERE. Since then it's a thought I have repeated without surprise in several more foreign places, even in Beijing -- but one I have pointedly never felt, really, in rural Michigan. And I think that would be hard to explain to adherents of the Faith. At least without getting mentally burnt at the stake...
Travel, it is said, broadens one's outlook. I was quite fortunate to have parents who had a serious wanderlust. We went to Greece and Spain when I was still a kid, and later I took a trip to Africa with my sister. We visited some places that were familiar--Athens in 1972 was pretty much any large city anywhere, but dotted with ruins and archaeological excavations; Nairobi was also a large city that reminded me very much of Manhattan. In other words, places that were at once exotic and yet comfortably recognizable. (Madrid in 1972 was still very much Franco's city, and my travels throughout the rest of Spain in '72 and '75 were a rather shocking introduction to life under actual fascism.)
I have more pity than disdain for the people who think anyplace that's not America is some kind of atrocious hellhole. They really should get out a see some of this amazing world we live in.
And I think every White person in America really REALLY needs to go to Africa and walk down the street in any city. Being the only White person gives you just a teeny glimmer of what Black people experience every day in America. I'm not talking about racism here--just the idea that you're different than everyone else in a very visible way; that the faces that surround to do not look like you.
A couple of years after my stepmother’s death, my old man (1921-2015), who had not left North America since his stint with the Marines in the South Pacific during the unpleasantness with Japan, took up globetrotting. This was a guy who voted Republican all his life, and would be all-in for Trump today (he thought Sarah Palin should have been at the top of the ticket in 2008; was a birther, hated Obama the Socialist, etc), but he returned in 1989 from the first of his many trips to Western Europe marveling “My god! The way they live over there! If people here could see that, there’d be a 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯!”
My own parents (1923 and 1926, RIP) never left North America (except for my dad, also in the South Pacific as an Army MP) but declined to take up globetrotting. They moved to Florida and got season tickets to Disneyworld. My dad used to say "We don't need to go to Europe, we've got Epcot!" I see now that they were frightened and insecure, but it sure came out as America First, with all the baggage that implies.
How much of the willful ignorance of the outside world comes from many of our people's most formative experience of its involving being shot-at and blown-up? That kind of thing can condition you pretty harshly, even if you did lose your notional cherry to some half-starving working girl in port.
As far as I can tell, this is what Putin does, he embarrasses democracies and makes them look dysfunctional and insane and incredibly negligent if not malevolent, and his own people have nothing they can point to as a better idea they'd maybe like to try.
I wasn't around in the fifties, but I know there was a lot of similar propaganda here too. This seems worse, somehow.
Putin's main concern is keeping everyone else busy enough that they have no attention to spare on whatever he decides Russia should get up to. He quite likely only spent the price of a couple fighter aircraft to put Trump in office and his thumb on the scale for Brexit; quite possibly the most effective defense spending in history, since most of the free world has been busy trying to un-shit their underpants for three years.
Out of dozens of Americans I know who've experienced European medical care, the one guy who was NOT impressed was the one guy out of all those guys you would absolutely expect it of. He got treated for an injury in Italy and complained about having to WAIT.
Up here Chicago is that city the whites leave every weekend to despoil our lakes and get away from the blacks. After I finally saw "Hamilton," I tried telling neighbors how great it was and they should see it. A common response was, "In Chicago? No, thanks. Too dangerous."
This is excellent Roy, and I think about this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. The class aspect (kids getting too big for their britches, etc. etc.) is important, but I think the viewpoint of many Trump voters is even darker. We look at the MAGAts and think, “don’t they know they’re getting screwed too, that he doesn’t give a shit about them? They must be stupid.” But I think they DO know. I think their support for Trump comes from a place of really deep cynicism and despair. They know deep down he won’t make their lives better, but so long as he hurts the people they perceive as being more successful and happier than they are, they don’t care. They don’t believe any politician will help them, so it’s all about redirecting the most pain onto their enemies. It’s why so much of Trump support boils down to “LOL, librul tears.”
When the New York Times or the Washington Post reporters descend on the diners and ask them about it, they dress it up and talk about Trump’s “policies” but I think it boils down to “I’m fucked (or think I am) so I want you to be fucked too, and harder.”
I’ll add that Bernie would have been a perfect fit to mitigate the cynicism of some of these Trump voters, if racism and tribalism against the perceived “haves” weren’t a more powerful motivator for them than their own well-being.
It's hard to tell what might be the more powerful motivator, especially now since there will not be anyone running out there who is going to actually improve these folks well being.
No improvement relative to Trump? None at all? Not one jot or tittle or iota?
I'm sorry not everyone got what they wanted; I honestly want everyone to get what they want if it's not that bad. I supported Sen. Warren and hoped that Sen. Sanders wouldn't run to compete with her because I thought she had a chance and he didn't, ever—you may well disagree with me about that, but that's my honest opinion of the prospects of any Jew who proclaimed himself a Socialist for years, asI think the best political thinker ever was Pavlov—but just as I'd vote for Trump with a clean conscience if Richard Spencer were the only alternative….
I hope that you get a chance to be pleasantly surprised; I hope the same for me as well, though my base-level expectation is that at least being aware of the greater world won't quite feel like having to trudge down to the cellar every evening to fetch a jar of pickles and to get my heart cut-out.
I just don't know about the electability of Sanders. I also wanted to see Warren as the nominee, even with this country's misogynistic bias. (Probably worse than the anti-semitism, but I've got no way to measure it.) Of course, nearly everyone including myself thought Trump was nearly unelectable and we were all wrong...
I was having a hard time reading Tweets from Bernie supporters today. It got to a point where Biden was called a "conservative Republican right-winger" -- a notion not well tethered to reality. And I don't understand how it has taken root: We really only have to look back 3 years to find Biden as the #2 guy in an administration that passed the ACA, jammed through Dreamer protections, signed the Paris climate change deal -- all improvements for what we might call folks -- and never produced one corruption scandal. Plus Warren and Bernie stand a 95% chance of being influential during a Biden Administration, and a 101% chance of being zero influence in a Trump Administration. So I just don't understand the "now nothing will improve, so forget it" approach that I see online (and among a couple IRL friends). I am really hoping that is a post-campaign funk that does not keep people home on election day.
I can’t stand Biden, but I will pull the lever for him primarily for two reasons: their names are Ginsburg and Breyer. I don’t want a 7-2 GOP SCOTUS coupled with 4 more years for Trump and cronies to suppress the vote. That would make it impossible to enact and uphold any of Bernie’s or Warren’s policies for at least a generation.
Yeah, well said! I think across W's unpaid-for Iraq adventure and Trump's cheap mobster presidency, we have forever lost our position as undisputed political and financial leader of the free world -- so the question in front of us becomes: But do we firmly install a hopeless new Feudalism here for the next 20-30 years, or, like, spend the next 5-15 years fighting like hell to beat that trend back into submission? That is what we are voting on in 2020.
One of the problems with taking the position that Bernie is/was the political Messiah is that you're left with not much to do after he gives up. That's the impetus for the conspiratorial thinking and doom and loathing the Democrats more than the Republicans--they were supposed to be on YOUR side , dammit!
There is a viable constituency for any politician who runs on "I will NOT make your life any better. However, I promise that I WILL make other people's live considerably worse. And I will let you watch!"
In some (too many) places, that platform will get a majority of votes.
Which always struck me as a rather damning (heh) indictment of such "christians." Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is (or at least should be) a sin. Looking forward to watching other people suffer for eternity with no hope of that suffering ever coming to an end? That, alone, should be grounds for one's own damnation.
The Bible Answer Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Hanegraaff) once answered a letter asking 'How will I in Heaven tolerate knowing my dear son's in Hell?' with an anodyne verse of 'Every tear there will be dried.' leading me to conclude that what's in Heaven is at best a bad copy of yourself, as I don't think I could be myself and tolerate such—then again, I'm a Jew-atheist, so I hate the idea of eternal damnation _twice_.
(Yes, there was some belief in eternal damnation among Jews, but it seems to have been found mostly in tractates written in Yiddish for women, as opposed to Serious Theological Discourse [in Hebrew and Aramaic, for me].)
(If I recall correctly from "The Satanic Verses", the Muslims have an out in Muhammed's saying that punishment is "Eternal, or as long as Allah wills it." which at least removes one Jewish objection to the concept, that being that it seems to conflict with G-d's being omnipotent. Must investigate further, hrrmmm…there seems to be a variance of opinion.)
As I recall, the Jewish version of eternal damnation is that God forgets you. Which, if you take such things seriously, would be perhaps the worst possible thing that could happen to your soul.
However, I grew up in a town that had a fairly large population of Holocaust survivors. More than a few that I knew had lost their faith because they felt that God had already forgotten them. As Art Speigelman's father Vladek said of the Jews crying out to God in Auschwitz, "But to this place, God didn't come."
To the extent that there's a mainstream view (among the Orthodox, because otherwise you're nailing Jell-O to the wall) most people spend some time in Gehenna, the worst being destroyed utterly after a year. Savage, but comparatively reasonable. On the up-side, all Israel have a share in the World to Come to the extent they learn and fulfill Torah, the righteous of all other nations have a share as well.
The World to Come is described as being like a banquet; folk-belief has it that the food is the flesh of Leviathan. One allegory claimed that both righteous and wicked are there at a long table, and that the reward of the righteous and that the punishment of the wicked is that each must be fed by the person next to them.
Mostly, though, I was told that one had to believe in reward and punishment after death*, but that it was bad form to dwell too much on specifics because 0.) there was no specific and definitive scripture and 1.) one should just have faith in G-d's justice and mercy, and He would know best.
*The Pharisees or scribes, like Jesus, believed in this, as opposed to the priests who believed in none such, and also believed in a reasonable laxity in the Law; I don't know but believe that it was this ideological closeness that made the Pharisees the Bad Guys in so much Christian scripture, as all committed ideologues hate their closest-but-not-close-enough relatives most.
Something I read a couple days ago included horror at the notion that no matter how much damage you did, no one should be sentenced to an eternity of torment for what they did in a single life. I mean, maybe you don't have to believe in reincarnation wholesale, but it seems like a decent god would offer best two out of three.
The 'Abominable Fancy', as someone called it, is I think part of it: some people need more than their own pleasure, they need others' suffering to feel that the Universe has put them where they're supposed to be.
A pure cynic would say that the Soroses (and, though you might hate this opinion, Bloombergs and Bezoses) of the world, out of practicality or to soothe the fractal remnants of their conscinces, want happy servants, but I think a fair number of such don't even care about that.
That is, I think they'd be as happy with no-one knowing about them or caring—I should have added Buffett—and all their luxuries served-up by robots, just like decent people want.
The prominence in the U.S. of a kind of evangelical Christianity which is so fervently, maniacally authoritarian has to be part of it. Sure on one level it's supposed to be about Jesus of Nazareth, but in practice so much of it really is the Gospel of Supply Side Jesus, Jesus God of War and Hellfire, Jesus who doesn't want to hear any of this liberal crap about "social justice" because the only thing that matters is who's In and who's Out when He comes to get you. Jesus doesn't want to hear you complaining about the CEO because once that kind of backtalk is allowed, next thing you know you'll be complaining about your daddy, or the pastor, or God Himself. And then you'll be letting the drag queens tell stories to your children, and with that all hope is lost for your soul and your children's souls.
Perhaps the best (?) thing about American authoritarian evangelical Christianity is that it ALL exists solely due to Martin Luther and the Reformation--which was about how the Church is NOT the sole intermediary between you and God, and how the Church really had NO earthly authority.
My cynical opinion, dominant today but not always, is that many people hunger for Authority, and in the absence of good traditions about who is a proper one—e.g., shaped by natural selection such that they won't kill _all_ of you or molest _every_ boy— will glom onto extremely bad ones.
They only care about Jesus as the team mascot. For their actual religion they have a mix of jingoism, nativism, the Old Testament, and the fever dream Revelation of St John. Jesus is just there to be a logo on the uniform.
I have a similar obsession. So these days I'm ghostwriting the memoir of a young woman who grew up in Roy's Fritters, Alabama, in a trailer, in a town with half the population of my high school. She came to NYC, got into a good profession, won international awards, AND is in therapy. I keep praising her for that, and keep telling her it's as much an accomplishment as anything, given her past. She tells me that, back home, you're not even allowed to mention "the T word." Because to even think about therapy is to show weakness. "You should be able to solve those problems yourself."
This, to me, is the "pride" of a prisoner in jail who is proud he doesn't have to make his own meals.
I've also wondered, every one of the thousands of times I've been to a supermarket and stood next to the tabloids, why ordinary and/or poor people want to read about Jennifer Aniston or Oprah and Steadman--i.e., why they want to rub their own noses in the glossy privilege of others. Then again, maybe it's only masochistic if you lack self-awareness.
Americans love fame. I recall a survey from a decade ago that found a majority of Americans, if forced to choose, would rather be famous than rich. Which makes no sense at all. But I guess many people see fame as a way of 1.) validating their existence, and 2.) achieving some sort of immortality.
Back when I was editing fly-fishing magazines, I received a steady stream of query letters and unsolicited articles about "Joe Blow's Whatsis Fly." Men would "invent" a fly pattern and name it after themselves hoping that, a century from now, people would be fishing with that fly pattern and remember Joe Blow's name. Which is a kind of immortality, I suppose.
There's also the other side of the apparent masochism, which is an ever-simmering sadistic wish: watching those rich famous people fail and then charging in with the scythes to cut down the tall trees.
Right. It occurred to me a few years ago that celeb stories can only be about "flying high with new success" or "the year from Hell." Because "Keanu Reeves Says Nothing New Has Happened Lately" isn't going to sell papers. Like the feller said, "Kick 'em when they're up/Kick 'em when they're down."
Ya know, I would actually part with a few coins to read a profile of the actual boring day-to-day of some celebrities. Because some of them actually have fascinating lives that are completely out of sight.
And I'm not talking about affairs or anything like that. I mean, as an example, Rod Stewart's recently revealed hobby of building super-scale model train layouts. Turns out that, when he's not out being Rod Stewart, he's home crafting exact scale replicas of buildings and streets. And it also turns out that there's a bunch of other famous people who are into model trains (Eric Clapton, for example).
The fetishization of suffering takes many forms. Historically some of them have been useful -- in military training, for example. It's also a key script in the addict's tape.
I think there's an element of guilt, too, that turns into something so corrosive from the tension of the demand that we think of ourselves as the light of the world, the new beginning, the fresh start in the New World, the Shining City, etc., versus the knowledge (however rudimentary) that we are in most ways like any other country on earth: we didn't magically appear on a new continent, pure in heart and deed, we invaded, we fought and killed and committed genocide and inflicted suffering on enslaved peoples we dragged here. That is, our history is as blood-soaked and violent as the history of any other human endeavor on earth.
We don't want to know that, but we are a young enough country that it takes genuine effort to NOT know it - we have written history and recorded testimony. Unlike, say, Russia, where Putin can retool a thousand year history to meet his own mythicized vision, we're younger and we have receipts.
When it's pointed out, people try and mostly fail with mythology, and end up with arguments like "What are we supposed to do? Leave the country? Give it back?", or try to mix it up with how it wasn't our fault, today, that Europeans brought their illnesses and their pig vectors, and 90% of our potential future neighbors died, or even that Africans were "immigrants".
Our history is knowable but there's such a compulsion to not know and the tension is destroying us. Sometimes I just want to say, "Look, our history is bloody and violent, welcome to humanity, and guess what, it doesn't have to be like that forever. Let's start today." But that would involve decapitating the interests of the wealthy power-holders who benefit so much from the "let's watch you and them fight" strategy.
I think, too, that those on the right who have undone their "not knowing" are actually embracing the dark elements. The attitude of conservatives for so long has been, as you've said, that the US is noble, good, altruistic. But under Trump, the need to pretend that we're good is slipping away, and instead it's being replaced with "Who cares if slavery was bad? It was 200 years ago, get over it." And it's amazing the ways in which the same right-winger will, on different days of the week, bounce between the ideas that "A Republican president freed the slaves," "Slavery wasn't that bad," and "The Confederacy was good and we need to keep these statues" without breaking a sweat.
It used to be the American lore that this nation of immigrants, excepting, of course Native Americans, was made up of people who came here to better themselves and were willing to take a chance, as opposed to the supposedly passive people they left behind.
But, while that has been true for many, even most immigrants and their dependents, the country also developed a culture of individualism, racism, religious intolerance and a distinct lack of solidarity except in times of desperate crisis. Alexis de Tocqueville in his landmark "Democracy in America" was one of the first to notice this in the 1830s.
It may well be that, because the nation does not have a shared racial and ethnic culture, it is harder to easily develop a sense of cross-class solidarity. Instead, our "culture" seems to be laissez-faire enterprise and individualism, which easily lends itself to corruption, social manipulation and other criminality and an authoritarian sense of f*ck you I've got mine. Fortunately, most people resist the worst aspects of this "culture" but the large number who identify as "conservative" certainly do.
The laissez-faire/screw you culture also consistently undermines democratic norms. That's the real danger of the GOP and the orange monster in the White House.
"And their supporters persist in letting them. Why?"
Also, too, this country produces people who *enjoy* being cruel and mean. As you describe it's just a built in part of the American culture. Performative cruelty for fun and sport. We're a serial killer nation.
I wish I could agree with this, but I think the truth is simpler: Trump is a damaged personality, the Republican officeholders care only for power and money, and their followers have been trained for 20 years to hate, and they enjoy it. That's about it, for me.
Since I don't have a clue why people are the way they are (or even why I am the way I am), I turn to science for an explanation or at least a hint. To that end, may I suggest some sources I've found enlightening: "The Criminal Personality" by Yochelson and Samerow, a three volume report of what they found working with criminals incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. "The Authoritarians," Bob Altemeyer's summary of his decades of researching the right wing authoritarian personality. "Thinking Fast and Slow," Daniel Kahneman's popularization of the extensive research into how our conscious and subconscious minds work. Any of several works popularizing the methods of probability and statistics, e.g., Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise" or Charles Whelan's "Naked Statistics." Finally, for an example of how a problem can be tackled through the most basic of scientific methods, I suggest "The City" by William H. Whyte, wherein through interviews and filming, Whyte and his associates determined which public spaces in NYC are popular and why.
I have used what I've learned from each of these in many aspects of my life, including career, community and volunteering. Sometimes successfully. But always better than if I just assumed I knew what to do.
Status is, for some people, the most valuable 'good' in the economists' sense, and the degradation of others is for a subset of them the best proof.
Others, I think, just have had what I consider an horrible, horrible, moral system inculcated into them. It's the sheer tenacity and resistance to argument and practical necessity that makes me think that it's a matter of sincere belief.
This is excellent Roy. But t'was not always thus. The union movement responsible for creating America's middle class was a collective effort that succeeded as much or even more than their European counterparts of the time, right up until the 60's and Civil Rights destroyed the white solidarity that empowered it. Ironically, it was the success of unions that gave white American workers the luxury to become dittoheads, Fox viewers, and such willing tools for their capitalist overlords.
The scumbags in charge are revealing themselves to be as villainous as we've always suspected, but, as Roy and everyone here has attempted to explain, the mystery is always why Americans support them. Racism, religion, xenophobia, sheer ignorance -- as Ellis Weiner says above, this topic is just too yooje. One anecdotal bit: In the working class half of my life, I'd occasionally point out to my colleagues some tidbit like how the average American worker toiled for 350 hours more per year than their German counterpart -- over two months of 40-hour weeks. Invariably, people I told this to either A. refused to believe it, or B. expressed their religious faith in American capitalism which just had to be better, or C. simply didn't allow the information to even enter their minds, as if I had told them Jesus was Jewish or something. They just didn't want to know.
If I really wanted to upset them, I'd show them just how much a billion dollars is.
Fuck, just ask 'em how long they'd have to work to earn Dick Cheney's $400,000 annual tax cut...and then point out that was only on his post-employment earnings from Halliburton.
When I moved to Vermont nearly 30 years ago, I heard what I thought were fables about poor people were genuinely pissed that their kids had to go to school. Those people didn't want their children learning anything because then their kids would be better than the parents. Turned out those weren't fables. I have heard from teachers and administrators about first-hand encounters with enraged parents who were fearful that their kids would end up with better-paying jobs and end up "putting on airs" because the kids learned to read and write.
In this, Vermont is kind of a bellwether of much of the rest of rural America. There has been a slow but steady sea change in the hinterlands, one that has taken us from each generation working hard to ensure then next generation has a better life and DOESN'T have to work as hard, to one that's much more of a crab-bucket mentality. No one escapes rural poverty because they will not let their kids have a better life.
A few months ago, I was in the wilds of South Carolina. One of the men I was working with started complaining about how "the kids today have it so easy." I said "Isn't that kind of the point? Making it easier for your kids to succeed?"
"No!" he said. He was adamant that his kids had to struggle at least as much as he did because struggle builds character. The fact that the deck is already stacked against his kids doesn't matter. And eventually it came out that what he really wanted was for his kids to be blue-collar working stiffs or (for his daughter) maybe a secretary or clerk before becoming a brood mare. In other words, he wanted his kids to be no better off than he was.
If your kids end up better off than you, it means you're a failure.
Listen, being paid a pittance to do dangerous work without adequate protections or health care that will still work after you can't because of your injuries is *part* of what makes you one of our Retail Heroes.
I'll be honest: my father, mostly not a bigoted man, believed that this was a Gentile character flaw. I have since, of course, now met and heard of many non-Jews who don't have it, and met my fair share of Jews who want their children to be as blinkered as they though better-off (I actually know a Jew who's proud of his son's going to work for the Federalist Society), but it was my dad's opinion that this and literacy that we really had going for us in the Modern World where it was now _possible_ for a son to be better-off than his father.
That is to say, in any human, this tendency seems likely an adaptation of millenia living in societies even more unfair than ours and under rulers who on their best days mostly were exactly like Donald Trump.
A countervailing stream in Jewish thought is that the unworthiness that led to our Temple's being destroyed and Exile from our homeland meant that we should not expect any kind of happiness until Meschiach came; the countervailing stream to _that_ is the doctrine that G-d created lawful pleasures and that rejecting them were rejecting him. I'm really glad we didn't have a Pope to settle things in one direction or another.
A rabbi once told me that the destruction of the Temple came about because the people took to gossiping, and as gossip destroys a community, so did it destroy the Temple. I know some ultra-orthodox Jews who believe this. I have even seen cars being driven by men wearing streimls with payos and full beards--with the bumper adorned with a single bumper sticker:
PUT THE BRAKES ON LASHON HARA
A grandfather was a disciple of the Chofetz Chayim (a rabbi named after his well-known book on (formally) 'ha-Lashon ha-Ra' ('malevolent language'); his wife was less enthusiastic, but had few friends with whom she _could_ gossip.
Another telling: 'The first Temple was destroyed when wedding songs were sung to celebrate homosexuality; the second was destroyed because of causeless internecine quarreling.' . I don't endorse the first section of that, but I'm not particularly ashamed because Earth has been barbarian territory for awhile and likely won't make it out that state before we kill ourselves, so I probably believe things equally barbarous and our notional descendants will all have their own stupid beliefs.
I think that you may be overestimating the knowledge (and maybe the intelligence) of the American people. I think that most (white, at least) Americans really do believe that these countries in places like Europe, for instance are indeed hell holes and we have it much better here. At least that is what I see from FB friends living here in the buttlands with me, and ones I know personally outside of social media. And let's not forget the GDNYT, just recently started a story telling us that the US medical system is the best in the world.
Freedom religion is a religion, isn't it? People not sure what the word means, it's kind of metaphysical, but we have it and those snotty foreigners don't. Sure things look nice in the Netherlands but they're probably empty inside where we are filled with our love of our freedom, whatever it is. We know this through our faith.
Yeah, the Netherlands is a complete hellhole. What, with legal hashish and legal prostitution and excellent beer and top-notch healthcare and world-leading public infrastructure and outstanding shipbuilding abilities and first-rate schools. Well, it's a wonder anyone can live there!
An early Nat Lampoon piece was a parody of a crank newsletter--lousy layout, typos, etc.--called something like The National Coalition to Beat the Dutch, about the perfidy and treachery of Holland, vile tulips, etc. "A Dutch treat? It's no treat at all!" So you're onto something here.
I always associated that with the "Canadian Border Town, the Shame of the North" complete with maple syrup addicts clogging the gutters.
Remember, hashish isn't legal, it's just not-illegal the moment it crosses the coffee-shop threshold…and evidently (as of a few years back) the Rightist government there has been cracking-down, such that mostly only the gangs were growing.
Hail Freedom, God of Freedom! I remember being as old as 17 and wondering how people could stand to live in other, lesser countries (all the others were lesser). On some level I imagined every European and Asian as longing to be American. It is not my fault, really: that was the general sense about us in the 1980s, I'd never been anyplace except the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and since grammar school (in suburban NJ, just outside NYC) our "social studies" textbooks taught that other countries were weird and backward (in Mexico they wore blankets and led burros around a desert, in Holland they wore wooden shoes and the children were put to work selling cheese on streetcorners, in Russia they stood in line all day for potatoes). I was 28 before I finally went anywhere; then I remember standing in a parking lot in Bath, England, and I made such weird eye contact with a stranger that it prompted him to say hello, and it suddenly hit me: Holy fuck, I could live my exact same happy life HERE. Since then it's a thought I have repeated without surprise in several more foreign places, even in Beijing -- but one I have pointedly never felt, really, in rural Michigan. And I think that would be hard to explain to adherents of the Faith. At least without getting mentally burnt at the stake...
Travel, it is said, broadens one's outlook. I was quite fortunate to have parents who had a serious wanderlust. We went to Greece and Spain when I was still a kid, and later I took a trip to Africa with my sister. We visited some places that were familiar--Athens in 1972 was pretty much any large city anywhere, but dotted with ruins and archaeological excavations; Nairobi was also a large city that reminded me very much of Manhattan. In other words, places that were at once exotic and yet comfortably recognizable. (Madrid in 1972 was still very much Franco's city, and my travels throughout the rest of Spain in '72 and '75 were a rather shocking introduction to life under actual fascism.)
I have more pity than disdain for the people who think anyplace that's not America is some kind of atrocious hellhole. They really should get out a see some of this amazing world we live in.
And I think every White person in America really REALLY needs to go to Africa and walk down the street in any city. Being the only White person gives you just a teeny glimmer of what Black people experience every day in America. I'm not talking about racism here--just the idea that you're different than everyone else in a very visible way; that the faces that surround to do not look like you.
A couple of years after my stepmother’s death, my old man (1921-2015), who had not left North America since his stint with the Marines in the South Pacific during the unpleasantness with Japan, took up globetrotting. This was a guy who voted Republican all his life, and would be all-in for Trump today (he thought Sarah Palin should have been at the top of the ticket in 2008; was a birther, hated Obama the Socialist, etc), but he returned in 1989 from the first of his many trips to Western Europe marveling “My god! The way they live over there! If people here could see that, there’d be a 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯!”
My own parents (1923 and 1926, RIP) never left North America (except for my dad, also in the South Pacific as an Army MP) but declined to take up globetrotting. They moved to Florida and got season tickets to Disneyworld. My dad used to say "We don't need to go to Europe, we've got Epcot!" I see now that they were frightened and insecure, but it sure came out as America First, with all the baggage that implies.
How much of the willful ignorance of the outside world comes from many of our people's most formative experience of its involving being shot-at and blown-up? That kind of thing can condition you pretty harshly, even if you did lose your notional cherry to some half-starving working girl in port.
As far as I can tell, this is what Putin does, he embarrasses democracies and makes them look dysfunctional and insane and incredibly negligent if not malevolent, and his own people have nothing they can point to as a better idea they'd maybe like to try.
I wasn't around in the fifties, but I know there was a lot of similar propaganda here too. This seems worse, somehow.
Putin's main concern is keeping everyone else busy enough that they have no attention to spare on whatever he decides Russia should get up to. He quite likely only spent the price of a couple fighter aircraft to put Trump in office and his thumb on the scale for Brexit; quite possibly the most effective defense spending in history, since most of the free world has been busy trying to un-shit their underpants for three years.
Out of dozens of Americans I know who've experienced European medical care, the one guy who was NOT impressed was the one guy out of all those guys you would absolutely expect it of. He got treated for an injury in Italy and complained about having to WAIT.
"Look at them Italians, all getting sick and dying!"
Many folks in the Buttlands don't even have a semi-realistic concept of what life is like in **Chicago**, let alone Norway, England or Italy.
Up here Chicago is that city the whites leave every weekend to despoil our lakes and get away from the blacks. After I finally saw "Hamilton," I tried telling neighbors how great it was and they should see it. A common response was, "In Chicago? No, thanks. Too dangerous."
(I'm a native Chicagoan who has lived in Atlanta/environs for the last thirty years. Second verse, same as the first.)
This is excellent Roy, and I think about this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. The class aspect (kids getting too big for their britches, etc. etc.) is important, but I think the viewpoint of many Trump voters is even darker. We look at the MAGAts and think, “don’t they know they’re getting screwed too, that he doesn’t give a shit about them? They must be stupid.” But I think they DO know. I think their support for Trump comes from a place of really deep cynicism and despair. They know deep down he won’t make their lives better, but so long as he hurts the people they perceive as being more successful and happier than they are, they don’t care. They don’t believe any politician will help them, so it’s all about redirecting the most pain onto their enemies. It’s why so much of Trump support boils down to “LOL, librul tears.”
When the New York Times or the Washington Post reporters descend on the diners and ask them about it, they dress it up and talk about Trump’s “policies” but I think it boils down to “I’m fucked (or think I am) so I want you to be fucked too, and harder.”
I’ll add that Bernie would have been a perfect fit to mitigate the cynicism of some of these Trump voters, if racism and tribalism against the perceived “haves” weren’t a more powerful motivator for them than their own well-being.
It's hard to tell what might be the more powerful motivator, especially now since there will not be anyone running out there who is going to actually improve these folks well being.
No improvement relative to Trump? None at all? Not one jot or tittle or iota?
I'm sorry not everyone got what they wanted; I honestly want everyone to get what they want if it's not that bad. I supported Sen. Warren and hoped that Sen. Sanders wouldn't run to compete with her because I thought she had a chance and he didn't, ever—you may well disagree with me about that, but that's my honest opinion of the prospects of any Jew who proclaimed himself a Socialist for years, asI think the best political thinker ever was Pavlov—but just as I'd vote for Trump with a clean conscience if Richard Spencer were the only alternative….
I hope that you get a chance to be pleasantly surprised; I hope the same for me as well, though my base-level expectation is that at least being aware of the greater world won't quite feel like having to trudge down to the cellar every evening to fetch a jar of pickles and to get my heart cut-out.
I just don't know about the electability of Sanders. I also wanted to see Warren as the nominee, even with this country's misogynistic bias. (Probably worse than the anti-semitism, but I've got no way to measure it.) Of course, nearly everyone including myself thought Trump was nearly unelectable and we were all wrong...
I was having a hard time reading Tweets from Bernie supporters today. It got to a point where Biden was called a "conservative Republican right-winger" -- a notion not well tethered to reality. And I don't understand how it has taken root: We really only have to look back 3 years to find Biden as the #2 guy in an administration that passed the ACA, jammed through Dreamer protections, signed the Paris climate change deal -- all improvements for what we might call folks -- and never produced one corruption scandal. Plus Warren and Bernie stand a 95% chance of being influential during a Biden Administration, and a 101% chance of being zero influence in a Trump Administration. So I just don't understand the "now nothing will improve, so forget it" approach that I see online (and among a couple IRL friends). I am really hoping that is a post-campaign funk that does not keep people home on election day.
I can’t stand Biden, but I will pull the lever for him primarily for two reasons: their names are Ginsburg and Breyer. I don’t want a 7-2 GOP SCOTUS coupled with 4 more years for Trump and cronies to suppress the vote. That would make it impossible to enact and uphold any of Bernie’s or Warren’s policies for at least a generation.
Yeah, well said! I think across W's unpaid-for Iraq adventure and Trump's cheap mobster presidency, we have forever lost our position as undisputed political and financial leader of the free world -- so the question in front of us becomes: But do we firmly install a hopeless new Feudalism here for the next 20-30 years, or, like, spend the next 5-15 years fighting like hell to beat that trend back into submission? That is what we are voting on in 2020.
One of the problems with taking the position that Bernie is/was the political Messiah is that you're left with not much to do after he gives up. That's the impetus for the conspiratorial thinking and doom and loathing the Democrats more than the Republicans--they were supposed to be on YOUR side , dammit!
And let's not forget anti-Semitism!
There is a viable constituency for any politician who runs on "I will NOT make your life any better. However, I promise that I WILL make other people's live considerably worse. And I will let you watch!"
In some (too many) places, that platform will get a majority of votes.
AKA The American South, 1876--present
There is out there a theory that one of the joys of heaven is watching the damned suffer in hell. Of course in that case, you are in heaven.
Which always struck me as a rather damning (heh) indictment of such "christians." Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is (or at least should be) a sin. Looking forward to watching other people suffer for eternity with no hope of that suffering ever coming to an end? That, alone, should be grounds for one's own damnation.
The Bible Answer Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Hanegraaff) once answered a letter asking 'How will I in Heaven tolerate knowing my dear son's in Hell?' with an anodyne verse of 'Every tear there will be dried.' leading me to conclude that what's in Heaven is at best a bad copy of yourself, as I don't think I could be myself and tolerate such—then again, I'm a Jew-atheist, so I hate the idea of eternal damnation _twice_.
(Yes, there was some belief in eternal damnation among Jews, but it seems to have been found mostly in tractates written in Yiddish for women, as opposed to Serious Theological Discourse [in Hebrew and Aramaic, for me].)
(If I recall correctly from "The Satanic Verses", the Muslims have an out in Muhammed's saying that punishment is "Eternal, or as long as Allah wills it." which at least removes one Jewish objection to the concept, that being that it seems to conflict with G-d's being omnipotent. Must investigate further, hrrmmm…there seems to be a variance of opinion.)
s/for me/for men/
As I recall, the Jewish version of eternal damnation is that God forgets you. Which, if you take such things seriously, would be perhaps the worst possible thing that could happen to your soul.
However, I grew up in a town that had a fairly large population of Holocaust survivors. More than a few that I knew had lost their faith because they felt that God had already forgotten them. As Art Speigelman's father Vladek said of the Jews crying out to God in Auschwitz, "But to this place, God didn't come."
To the extent that there's a mainstream view (among the Orthodox, because otherwise you're nailing Jell-O to the wall) most people spend some time in Gehenna, the worst being destroyed utterly after a year. Savage, but comparatively reasonable. On the up-side, all Israel have a share in the World to Come to the extent they learn and fulfill Torah, the righteous of all other nations have a share as well.
The World to Come is described as being like a banquet; folk-belief has it that the food is the flesh of Leviathan. One allegory claimed that both righteous and wicked are there at a long table, and that the reward of the righteous and that the punishment of the wicked is that each must be fed by the person next to them.
Mostly, though, I was told that one had to believe in reward and punishment after death*, but that it was bad form to dwell too much on specifics because 0.) there was no specific and definitive scripture and 1.) one should just have faith in G-d's justice and mercy, and He would know best.
*The Pharisees or scribes, like Jesus, believed in this, as opposed to the priests who believed in none such, and also believed in a reasonable laxity in the Law; I don't know but believe that it was this ideological closeness that made the Pharisees the Bad Guys in so much Christian scripture, as all committed ideologues hate their closest-but-not-close-enough relatives most.
Something I read a couple days ago included horror at the notion that no matter how much damage you did, no one should be sentenced to an eternity of torment for what they did in a single life. I mean, maybe you don't have to believe in reincarnation wholesale, but it seems like a decent god would offer best two out of three.
Well, yes, but it was a <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abominable_fancy>Christian theologian</a> who condemned the concept. Obviously, some Christians are much better than others.
And taking pride in, basically, having been born in the right time and place to people who believed the right thing because they'd been told to.
The 'Abominable Fancy', as someone called it, is I think part of it: some people need more than their own pleasure, they need others' suffering to feel that the Universe has put them where they're supposed to be.
A pure cynic would say that the Soroses (and, though you might hate this opinion, Bloombergs and Bezoses) of the world, out of practicality or to soothe the fractal remnants of their conscinces, want happy servants, but I think a fair number of such don't even care about that.
That is, I think they'd be as happy with no-one knowing about them or caring—I should have added Buffett—and all their luxuries served-up by robots, just like decent people want.
s/conscinces/consciences/
If you're more down than I am, I'm more up.
Generations' worth of propaganda has been spent on telling them that Gummint can do them no good, it only helps the Jew queer Mooslem* blacks.
*The name, incidentally, of the vehicle that brought Bullwinkle to the Moon.
Wish I had more than one upvote for the Bullwinkle reference!
The prominence in the U.S. of a kind of evangelical Christianity which is so fervently, maniacally authoritarian has to be part of it. Sure on one level it's supposed to be about Jesus of Nazareth, but in practice so much of it really is the Gospel of Supply Side Jesus, Jesus God of War and Hellfire, Jesus who doesn't want to hear any of this liberal crap about "social justice" because the only thing that matters is who's In and who's Out when He comes to get you. Jesus doesn't want to hear you complaining about the CEO because once that kind of backtalk is allowed, next thing you know you'll be complaining about your daddy, or the pastor, or God Himself. And then you'll be letting the drag queens tell stories to your children, and with that all hope is lost for your soul and your children's souls.
Perhaps the best (?) thing about American authoritarian evangelical Christianity is that it ALL exists solely due to Martin Luther and the Reformation--which was about how the Church is NOT the sole intermediary between you and God, and how the Church really had NO earthly authority.
Which makes it doubly sadder that it has been taken over by charlatans, grifters and authoritarian haters (often all three).
My cynical opinion, dominant today but not always, is that many people hunger for Authority, and in the absence of good traditions about who is a proper one—e.g., shaped by natural selection such that they won't kill _all_ of you or molest _every_ boy— will glom onto extremely bad ones.
They only care about Jesus as the team mascot. For their actual religion they have a mix of jingoism, nativism, the Old Testament, and the fever dream Revelation of St John. Jesus is just there to be a logo on the uniform.
I have a similar obsession. So these days I'm ghostwriting the memoir of a young woman who grew up in Roy's Fritters, Alabama, in a trailer, in a town with half the population of my high school. She came to NYC, got into a good profession, won international awards, AND is in therapy. I keep praising her for that, and keep telling her it's as much an accomplishment as anything, given her past. She tells me that, back home, you're not even allowed to mention "the T word." Because to even think about therapy is to show weakness. "You should be able to solve those problems yourself."
This, to me, is the "pride" of a prisoner in jail who is proud he doesn't have to make his own meals.
I've also wondered, every one of the thousands of times I've been to a supermarket and stood next to the tabloids, why ordinary and/or poor people want to read about Jennifer Aniston or Oprah and Steadman--i.e., why they want to rub their own noses in the glossy privilege of others. Then again, maybe it's only masochistic if you lack self-awareness.
This is a yooje topic. I could go on.
...Maybe it's only masochistic if you HAVE self-awareness, I mean. Sorry for the confusion.
Americans love fame. I recall a survey from a decade ago that found a majority of Americans, if forced to choose, would rather be famous than rich. Which makes no sense at all. But I guess many people see fame as a way of 1.) validating their existence, and 2.) achieving some sort of immortality.
Back when I was editing fly-fishing magazines, I received a steady stream of query letters and unsolicited articles about "Joe Blow's Whatsis Fly." Men would "invent" a fly pattern and name it after themselves hoping that, a century from now, people would be fishing with that fly pattern and remember Joe Blow's name. Which is a kind of immortality, I suppose.
There's also the other side of the apparent masochism, which is an ever-simmering sadistic wish: watching those rich famous people fail and then charging in with the scythes to cut down the tall trees.
Right. It occurred to me a few years ago that celeb stories can only be about "flying high with new success" or "the year from Hell." Because "Keanu Reeves Says Nothing New Has Happened Lately" isn't going to sell papers. Like the feller said, "Kick 'em when they're up/Kick 'em when they're down."
Ya know, I would actually part with a few coins to read a profile of the actual boring day-to-day of some celebrities. Because some of them actually have fascinating lives that are completely out of sight.
And I'm not talking about affairs or anything like that. I mean, as an example, Rod Stewart's recently revealed hobby of building super-scale model train layouts. Turns out that, when he's not out being Rod Stewart, he's home crafting exact scale replicas of buildings and streets. And it also turns out that there's a bunch of other famous people who are into model trains (Eric Clapton, for example).
Andy Partridge of XTC used to, and maybe still does, meticulously paint the uniforms, etc., of tiny lead soldiers. People! Amirite?
Exactly! I always love reading about people who have essentially unlimited wealth, but have very quotidinal hobbies.
The Blow Fly is well known to criminologists who study decaying corpses.
You should meet orchid growers.
My sister is a florist, so I have met a few.
Including one who ran his business out of an abandoned cemetery. Yes, he was a . . . cryptorchid grower. [ducks while sidling toward the door]
The fetishization of suffering takes many forms. Historically some of them have been useful -- in military training, for example. It's also a key script in the addict's tape.
Please make this column public, Roy.
I think there's an element of guilt, too, that turns into something so corrosive from the tension of the demand that we think of ourselves as the light of the world, the new beginning, the fresh start in the New World, the Shining City, etc., versus the knowledge (however rudimentary) that we are in most ways like any other country on earth: we didn't magically appear on a new continent, pure in heart and deed, we invaded, we fought and killed and committed genocide and inflicted suffering on enslaved peoples we dragged here. That is, our history is as blood-soaked and violent as the history of any other human endeavor on earth.
We don't want to know that, but we are a young enough country that it takes genuine effort to NOT know it - we have written history and recorded testimony. Unlike, say, Russia, where Putin can retool a thousand year history to meet his own mythicized vision, we're younger and we have receipts.
When it's pointed out, people try and mostly fail with mythology, and end up with arguments like "What are we supposed to do? Leave the country? Give it back?", or try to mix it up with how it wasn't our fault, today, that Europeans brought their illnesses and their pig vectors, and 90% of our potential future neighbors died, or even that Africans were "immigrants".
Our history is knowable but there's such a compulsion to not know and the tension is destroying us. Sometimes I just want to say, "Look, our history is bloody and violent, welcome to humanity, and guess what, it doesn't have to be like that forever. Let's start today." But that would involve decapitating the interests of the wealthy power-holders who benefit so much from the "let's watch you and them fight" strategy.
I think, too, that those on the right who have undone their "not knowing" are actually embracing the dark elements. The attitude of conservatives for so long has been, as you've said, that the US is noble, good, altruistic. But under Trump, the need to pretend that we're good is slipping away, and instead it's being replaced with "Who cares if slavery was bad? It was 200 years ago, get over it." And it's amazing the ways in which the same right-winger will, on different days of the week, bounce between the ideas that "A Republican president freed the slaves," "Slavery wasn't that bad," and "The Confederacy was good and we need to keep these statues" without breaking a sweat.
Rightwinger: "Taxes are worse than slavery! But actual slavery? No so bad.
"Trump defends Putin: 'You think our country's so innocent?'" Even cynicism is weaponized now. https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/04/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin/index.html
"Our history is knowable but there's such a compulsion to not know..." I think we lost a lot when we decided to give up teaching it.
This is terrific.
It used to be the American lore that this nation of immigrants, excepting, of course Native Americans, was made up of people who came here to better themselves and were willing to take a chance, as opposed to the supposedly passive people they left behind.
But, while that has been true for many, even most immigrants and their dependents, the country also developed a culture of individualism, racism, religious intolerance and a distinct lack of solidarity except in times of desperate crisis. Alexis de Tocqueville in his landmark "Democracy in America" was one of the first to notice this in the 1830s.
It may well be that, because the nation does not have a shared racial and ethnic culture, it is harder to easily develop a sense of cross-class solidarity. Instead, our "culture" seems to be laissez-faire enterprise and individualism, which easily lends itself to corruption, social manipulation and other criminality and an authoritarian sense of f*ck you I've got mine. Fortunately, most people resist the worst aspects of this "culture" but the large number who identify as "conservative" certainly do.
The laissez-faire/screw you culture also consistently undermines democratic norms. That's the real danger of the GOP and the orange monster in the White House.
"And their supporters persist in letting them. Why?"
Also, too, this country produces people who *enjoy* being cruel and mean. As you describe it's just a built in part of the American culture. Performative cruelty for fun and sport. We're a serial killer nation.
I wish I could agree with this, but I think the truth is simpler: Trump is a damaged personality, the Republican officeholders care only for power and money, and their followers have been trained for 20 years to hate, and they enjoy it. That's about it, for me.
Why don't you be like me?
Why don't you stop and see?
Why don't you hate who I hate,
Kill who I kill to be free?
Since I don't have a clue why people are the way they are (or even why I am the way I am), I turn to science for an explanation or at least a hint. To that end, may I suggest some sources I've found enlightening: "The Criminal Personality" by Yochelson and Samerow, a three volume report of what they found working with criminals incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. "The Authoritarians," Bob Altemeyer's summary of his decades of researching the right wing authoritarian personality. "Thinking Fast and Slow," Daniel Kahneman's popularization of the extensive research into how our conscious and subconscious minds work. Any of several works popularizing the methods of probability and statistics, e.g., Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise" or Charles Whelan's "Naked Statistics." Finally, for an example of how a problem can be tackled through the most basic of scientific methods, I suggest "The City" by William H. Whyte, wherein through interviews and filming, Whyte and his associates determined which public spaces in NYC are popular and why.
I have used what I've learned from each of these in many aspects of my life, including career, community and volunteering. Sometimes successfully. But always better than if I just assumed I knew what to do.
Always an upvote for Bob Altemeyer's work.
Status is, for some people, the most valuable 'good' in the economists' sense, and the degradation of others is for a subset of them the best proof.
Others, I think, just have had what I consider an horrible, horrible, moral system inculcated into them. It's the sheer tenacity and resistance to argument and practical necessity that makes me think that it's a matter of sincere belief.
A sad perspective Roy but the right one. (RIP Sanders 2020!) is just as sad.
This is excellent Roy. But t'was not always thus. The union movement responsible for creating America's middle class was a collective effort that succeeded as much or even more than their European counterparts of the time, right up until the 60's and Civil Rights destroyed the white solidarity that empowered it. Ironically, it was the success of unions that gave white American workers the luxury to become dittoheads, Fox viewers, and such willing tools for their capitalist overlords.
The scumbags in charge are revealing themselves to be as villainous as we've always suspected, but, as Roy and everyone here has attempted to explain, the mystery is always why Americans support them. Racism, religion, xenophobia, sheer ignorance -- as Ellis Weiner says above, this topic is just too yooje. One anecdotal bit: In the working class half of my life, I'd occasionally point out to my colleagues some tidbit like how the average American worker toiled for 350 hours more per year than their German counterpart -- over two months of 40-hour weeks. Invariably, people I told this to either A. refused to believe it, or B. expressed their religious faith in American capitalism which just had to be better, or C. simply didn't allow the information to even enter their minds, as if I had told them Jesus was Jewish or something. They just didn't want to know.
If I really wanted to upset them, I'd show them just how much a billion dollars is.
Fuck, just ask 'em how long they'd have to work to earn Dick Cheney's $400,000 annual tax cut...and then point out that was only on his post-employment earnings from Halliburton.
Anyone's opinion of Jonathan Haidt's work, ignoring (for the moment) his side-business of hating liberal academics?
Anyone's opinion of Jonathan Haidt's work, ignoring (for the moment) his side-business of hating liberal academics?